What's going on with Gitmo?
"The most expensive, most notorious old-folks home ... you've ever seen"
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“America’s tiniest boutique prison, reserved exclusively for alleged geriatric jihadists.”
“They brought a new cell down that is wheelchair accessible, so you're going to have the most expensive, most notorious old-folks home in the Caribbean that you've ever seen…”
We are coming up on 18 years since the Bush administration started plucking people out of the Middle East and throwing them in a hole in the Caribbean once known as Camp X-Ray, a small outpost of American-occupied Cuban land, which became the Naval beach resort and prison at Guantánamo Bay.
I was a tween when 9/11 happened, and the early Bush years were formative in developing my politics. Looking back, the early stories of Guantánamo, coupled with stark post-9/11 American Islamophobia, coincided with my growing realization that the United States was not a white knight in the world order.
I understood pretty early on that the Troops were basically kidnapping people, shipping them to Guantánamo, and letting them rot in cages there without charging them with anything. Some of them were terrorists probably, but who could really know? It bothered me then, it bothers me now. It’s not an insignificant reason I decided I wanted (to attempt) to protect people’s Constitutional rights for a living.
I’m thirty now. Guantánamo is still open, with 40 men imprisoned there.
Recently, five men actually accused of being directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, learned that they finally have a trial date. It will be Jan. 11, 2021. Twenty years after the attacks.
Even that date is probably a pipe dream, though. It turns out that it’s very hard for the government to credibly give a fair trial to people they’ve also extensively tortured. Defense attorneys keep bringing up that pesky little issue, asking for things like basic equipment to test their clients for physical signs of that torture:
A judge has yet to rule on whether crucial F.B.I. agents’ descriptions of the defendants’ confessions are admissible because the defendants were tortured in C.I.A. prisons… Another outstanding issue is the need for magnetic resonance imaging scans of the five defendants to see if they suffered brain or other physical damage from torture.
Beyond 2021, the plan for the prison seems to be to keep pouring money into it until its aging prisoners meet their natural deaths:
[T]he expense now works out to about $13 million for each of the 40 prisoners being held there … Because of the relative isolation of its location on a United States Navy base on Cuba’s southeast coast, the military assigns around 1,800 troops to the detention center, or 45 for each prisoner.
Having not planned the site to be a maximum-security old folks home, the government has no infrastructure to accommodate the elderly.
The Pentagon has asked Congress for $88.5 million to build a wheelchair-accessible detention facility with hospice care capacity specifically for the 15 prisoners who were initially held in C.I.A. custody.
If no new prison is built, it said, future inmates “bound to wheelchair and/or hospital bed” would “require guards or medical personnel to carry detainees from cell to cell placing the security and safety of U.S. personnel at risk.” (emphasis added)
Part of the problem is that the government refuses to transport any prisoner to the U.S. mainland for political reasons, even though the U.S. has an obligation under the Geneva Convention to provide adequate medical care to prisoners of war. That becomes a problem when, for example, it flies a surgeon down to perform spinal surgery on an aging prisoner and there turn out to be complications that can’t easily be fixed outside a proper hospital.
A doctor at the hospital declared the operation a failure and said the best course of action would be to transport [Abd al Hadi al Iraqi] to a naval hospital in Portsmouth, Va., “or any medical center that has the support systems in place to perform these complex procedures.”
However, transporting Guantánamo prisoners to the mainland is a political issue, even all these years later. So, instead, the government kept flying new teams of doctors in to try to fix Abd al Hadi al Iraqi’s failed surgery. As a result, he had five surgeries over the course of nine months between fall 2017 and summer 2018.
On a human level, this is atrocious medical care, and probably its own Geneva Convention violation. Hadi will be in chronic pain for his entire life. Legally, it also sets back his case. Legally, it means more delay. week-long military commission hearing on his case in August was mostly taken up by arguing about his health and what kind of accommodations he might need.
The most obvious, easiest, cheapest solution to the Guantánamo problem—which Obama tried and failed to do during his presidency—would be just to transfer the remaining prisoners to jail facilities in the United States. Congress continues to block any attempt at moving prisoners to the U.S., with only two exceptions:
Across the years, only two Guantánamo prisoners have been transferred to the United States. One was Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was born in the United States and challenged his military detention to the Supreme Court, and who was sent to Saudi Arabia, where he grew up, in 2004. The other was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 45, of Tanzania, who was sent to New York in 2009, tried and convicted over his role in Al Qaeda’s bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa in 1998. He is serving a life sentence at a federal prison in eastern Kentucky.
(The Times, strangely, links to its prior story about Ghailani’s conviction, but does not link to a story about Hamdi. Hamdi was an American citizen held for years in Guantánamo without being charged. He was then allowed to be released to live in Saudi Arabia if he promised never to sue the U.S. government for unlawfully marooning him on a desert island without due process.)
Back in 2015, Mitch McConnell, who always had the best of intentions when blocking President Obama’s legislative agenda, told reporters that Congress was opposed to “moving Guantánamo terrorists into the backyards of the American people.”
More likely it has something to do with moving the men to a place where the Constitution fully applies. The government tortured most of these men. To bring them to the mainland for trials would bring that back into the public consciousness. It is not insignificant that only a small handful of reporters and news outlets still bother devoting resources to Guantánamo. You can imagine the dozens of reporters that would dig in to a trial held somewhere more convenient.
Closing Guantánamo would risk a major reckoning with the crimes of the Bush years, which have largely been left behind in the public consciousness. Instead, the government pours money into keeping the prison open. It is a very expensive way of keeping the prisoners—and their stories of state-sponsored torture—stranded in a remote corner of Cuba, and hoping we all forget.
n.b. I tried to find a good way to fit in a link to this piece about Guantánamo detainee Ghassan al-Sharbi speaking out about American politics, but it didn’t really fit anywhere. However, after almost two decades of refusing to speak to the press, he wrote a letter to the Intercept about Lindsey Graham and Tom Friedman, which is, imo, hilarious and worth a read.